Education for Librarianship in the Next Century

published or submitted for publicatio

Context and Relationships: Ireland and Irish Studies

Students, editors, researchers, and the public are necessarily concerned with the context and relationships of names and topics found when reading texts. What other documents relate this topic? Where and when did this happen? What else was going on around that time and place? Who were the people and institutions mentioned? How were they related? What else did they do? This project will develop three tools: A Context Finder will find information in reference works about names, words, or phrases found when reading; a Context Builder will annotate texts with the source of information for the next reader; and reference works will be enriched by Context Provider to show where the names or topics were mentioned in texts. An international collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, and the Queen's University, Belfast will develop these tools for texts relating to Ireland

The Physical, Mental and Social Dimensions of Documents

In the development of documentation studies at the University of Tromsø and the founding of the Document Academy it was asserted that one should view a document as having three complementary and simultaneous aspects: physical, mental, and social. These three document dimensions and relationships between them are discussed. Physicality is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for being a document, there must also be a mental angle, which, in turn, entails a social (cultural) angle. The physical disposition of documents is influenced by social controls. The inability of any one angle to fully characterize a document explains the role of documents in the social construction of reality and why “relevance” in retrieval evaluation can be understood but resists scientific treatment

Before the Antelope: Robert Pagès on Documents

In 1951 Suzanne Briet wrote, with minimal explanation, that an antelope could become a document. In 1948 Robert Pagès (1919-2007) published an explanation of the same and related ideas. Textual and other graphic documents are about something, hence descriptive and derived. Animals and other objects are informative because they are illustrative of themselves either as specimens of a class (tokens of a type) or simply as particular individuals (“autodocuments”). Pagès’ career and ideas are briefly discussed

Introduction to Robert Pagès’ “Documentary Transformations and Cultural Context”

Robert Pagès (1919-2007) was an anarchist activist who later became director of a major social psychology research laboratory. Between these roles he was a student in documentation established in Paris by Suzanne Briet and others at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. In 1947 while he was a student of documentation Pagès submitted a thesis entitled “Transformations documentaires et milieu culturel” (Documentary transformations and cultural context) which was published as an article in the Review of Documentation in 1948. A key theme was that documentation is to culture what machinery is to industry. This introduction situates and explains some key ideas from Pagès\u27 article

From Fief to Clan: Boisot’s Information Space Model as a Documentary Theory for Cultural and Institutional Analysis

Max Boisot (1943-2011) and his Information Space (I-Space) model are introduced. The I-Space model characterized information flow on three dimensions (codification, abstraction, and diffusion). It can be seen as a document-based model. Boisot and colleagues identifies four types of institutional information practices (bureaucracies, markets, fiefs, and clans). Chinese economic reform in the 1980s is used as a case-study to demonstrate how document configuration and infrastructure is associated with cultural and institutional change. This echoes Suzanne Briet\u27s assertion that documentation is a cultural technique

Chlorinated organic contaminants in breast milk of New Zealand women.

Breast milk samples from 38 women in New Zealand were analyzed for organochlorine pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs), and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs) as part of a World Health Organization collaborative study of breast-milk contaminants. The women were recruited from two urban areas (Auckland and Christchurch) and two rural areas (Northland and North Canterbury) in the North and South Islands of New Zealand. The best predictor of contaminant concentrations in breast milk was found to be the age of the mother. Regional differences were found for hexachlorobenzene, dieldrin, and pp-DDE, reflecting historical use patterns. Urban-rural differences were found for several PCBs, PCDDs, and PCDFs when contaminant concentrations were calculated on a whole-milk basis. However, these differences could be attributed to variation in breast-milk fat concentrations between urban and rural mothers. Urban mothers had about 50% more breast-milk fat than rural mothers. Evidence suggests that breast-milk consumption by babies is regulated by caloric intake. Almost all of the caloric content of milk is in the fat fraction. This suggests that breast-milk contaminant levels calculated on a whole-milk basis do not necessarily reflect the relative levels of exposure of infants to these contaminants. However, the factors that influence breast-milk fat concentration deserve further study

Context, Relevance, and Labor

Since information science concerns the transmission of records, it concerns context. The transmission of documents ensures their arrival in new contexts. Documents and their copies are spread across times and places. The amount of labor required to discover and retrieve relevant documents is also formulated by context. Thus, any serious consideration of communication and of information technologies quickly leads to a concern with context, relevance, and labor. Information scientists have developed many theories of context, relevance, and labor but not a framework for organizing them and describing their relationship with one another. We propose the words context and relevance can be used to articulate a useful framework for considering the diversity of approaches to context and relevance in information science, as well as their relations with each other and with labor